THE LION-HEARTED BISHOP
“Mad Jim"—An ideal pioneer—A novel way of landing in Africa—"Teek, teek, teek"—Encounter with lions—Turned back from the goal—Bishop of East Equatorial Africa—The new route to Uganda—Through Masailand—The El Moran—Greasy bed-fellows—The forbidden land—Martyrdom.
THERE is no chapter in the story of modern missions which has more of the romantic element about it than that which tells how the Kingdom of Uganda, within less than a generation, was turned from a land of heathen darkness and cruelty to one in which on the Lord's Day such scenes of devout Christian worship are to be witnessed in church and cathedral as are described on a preceding page in the language of the Rev. Mr. Moffat. We have spoken of Alexander Mackay as the hero of Uganda; and undoubtedly it was he more than any other who sowed in that land the seed which has been reaped so plentifully since. But there is another name which the Church of Uganda must ever cherish side by side with Mackay's— the name of that lion-hearted man, Bishop Hannington, who literally laid down his life for her sake. It is true that Hannington never saw Uganda. And yet during his brief missionary career it was for Uganda most of all that he graved and toiled and suffered, and it was for Uganda, too, that he died at last a martyr's death. When the soldiers of the cruel Mwanga were about to thrust their spears into his body as he stood on the very threshold of the land he had sought so long, he bade them tell their king "that he was about to die for Uganda, and that he had purchased the road to Uganda with his life.”
James Hannington was the very ideal of a pioneer missionary. Full of physical vitality and animal spirits, and absolutely devoid of fear, he spent his boyhood in all kinds of adventures by land and water, which sometimes developed into schoolboy scrapes of the kind that Mr. Kipling describes so vividly in Stalky cg Co. When only twelve, he had the thumb of his left hand blown off by some damp gunpowder squibs or "blue devils," which he had manufactured with a view to taking a wasp's nest. And in after years, when a young curate, he often alarmed the parishioners by his reckless feats as a climber and egg-hunter on the Devonshire cliffs.
But in the heart of "Mad Jim," as he had been called at school, there grew up a great love for Christ, and a desire to serve Him in the ministry of the Church. And when he took Holy Orders, after studying at Oxford, it proved that his adventurous spirit, his athletic habits, and his frank outspoken manliness gave him a power over many minds which the ordinary clergyman mostly fails to reach. By and by the stirrings of the heart began to urge him forth to a larger and more difficult field than he could find at home. In particular, when word came to England of the murder of Lieutenant Smith and Mr. O'Neill on the Victoria Nyanza, he felt the impulse of the brave soldier to step into the gap where a comrade has fallen. And when the Church Missionary Society decided to send a fresh party to Uganda to reinforce Mackay, who was holding the ground with a single companion in the face of infinite difficulties and discouragements, Hannington was one of the first to volunteer. He was most happily settled by this time as incumbent of St. George's Chapel, Hurstpierpoint, the home of his boyhood and youth, and had besides a wife and young children to whom he was FIRST LANDING IN AFRICA From a sketch by Bishop Hannington passionately attached. But the call he heard was one to which he could give no denial. For Christ and for Africa he felt that he must be willing to suffer the loss of all things.
Hannington was appointed leader of the new party, which consisted of six men; and his instructions were to endeavor to reach Uganda from Zanzibar by what was then the ordinary route, viz, to the south end of the Victoria Nyanza, and thereafter by boat across the Lake to Rubaga, King Mtesa's capital. His first landing in Africa was thoroughly like himself. The thirty miles of channel between Zanzibar and the mainland was crossed in a filthy Arab dhow, but the water was so shallow that the vessel could not get within half a mile of the shore. A dug-out canoe put off to their assistance, in which the rest of the passengers were conveyed to land two or three at a time. But as the sea was rough the waves broke constantly over the canoe, nearly filling it with water. Hannington said "that he preferred a regular bathe to a foot-bath with his boots on. So he stripped off his clothes, put them into a bag which he carried on his head, and disregarding the sharks, he waded and stumbled and swam over the half-mile of rough coral and through the breakers which lay between the vessel and the beach. So he landed on the coast of Africa in a manner quite characteristic.”
When Hannington went up for his examination before being ordained, he did not make a very brilliant appearance, and the Bishop, after looking him all over, said, "You've got fine legs, I see: mind that you run about your parish." His parish now was East Central Africa; and it was well that he had good legs. Practically the whole of his life as a missionary was spent in journeying up and down this vast region. But to a man of his temperament, though the motive of carrying the Gospel to the heart of the African continent was the central one, exploration and adventure were very welcome in themselves, and he entered into his new experiences with much of the zest of his boyish days. Here is a description written to his nephews and nieces, and accompanied by one of those droll sketches with which he often embellished his letters to familiar friends:—
“Fancy a set of hideous savages regarding your uncle as a strange, outlandish creature, frightful to behold! Are those your feet, white man?" No, gentlemen, they are not. They are my sandals.' But, do they grow to your feet?" No, gentlemen, they do not; I will show you.' So I would unlace a boot. A roar of astonishment followed when they saw my blue sock, as they thought my feet must be blue and toeless. I pulled off the sock, and they were dumbfounded at the sight of my white, five-toed foot. They used to think that only my face and hands were white, and the rest of me black like themselves. My watch, too, was an unfailing attraction. There is a man in it.' It is Lubari; it is witchcraft,' they would cry. ‘He talks; he says, Teek, teek, teek.' My nose they they would compare with a spear, it struck them as so sharp and thin as compared with their own. Often one would give my hair a smart pull to try whether it were a wig and would come off.”
There were times when the experiences of the travelers were more dangerous than amusing, for there were murderous robbers in some of the forests, who were ever on the watch to pounce upon unwary strangers, and there were deep pits, cunningly covered over with twigs and grass, and with upright spears at the bottom, which were used by the natives as traps for the larger kinds of game. To stumble into one of these means almost certainly a horrible death. Hannington himself fell into one, but fortunately in this case the spears were wanting; and he was not dangerously hurt, though much shaken and bruised.
It was fitting that this lion-hearted missionary should have more than one exciting encounter with lions. The most thrilling of all took place one day when he had gone out to shoot, accompanied by a single boy. Seeing a small animal moving through the long grass in front, he fired, and the creature rolled over quite dead. On coming up to it he discovered that it was nothing less than a lion's whelp. Immediately the boy shouted, "Run, master, run!" and took to his heels as hard as he could. His terror was not premature, for the next moment, with terrific roars, a large lion and lioness came bounding towards Hannington out of the jungle. His gun was empty, he had no time to reload; but though his natural impulse was to run, he felt at once that this would be fatal. So he stood his ground, and when the lions came near growling and lashing their tails and glaring at this intruder, he only glared back at them with steady eyes.
This unflinching courage completely subdued them, and as they stood staring fiercely at him, he gradually retreated backwards for a hundred yards or so, facing them all the while, and then turned and quietly walked away. Most men, however brave, would have been content with this victory. But Hannington was not content; for he now determined to go back and secure the young lion's skin if possible. As he drew near again he saw that the lion and its mate were walking round and round the dead body of their whelp, licking it, and turning it over, and trying to restore it to life. Throwing his arms into the air and yelling as loud as he could, he rushed forward; and the fierce beasts, which evidently had never met such a person as this before, fairly turned tail and leaped away into the bush. Whereupon Hannington seized his prize, and by and by marched into camp carrying it triumphantly on his shoulders.
The Victoria Nyanza was reached about Christmas, 1882, after a weary journey of several months, marked not only by dangers from lions, leopards, rhinos, and buffaloes, but by constant worries and anxieties due to the fact that the expedition was very badly provided with supplies. At first it seemed to Hannington that his journey was almost at an end, for only the great sheet of water now separated him from Uganda. But, like Mackay before him, he soon found that his worst troubles were yet to come. In the meantime they had no means of crossing, and while Hannington toiled to make arrangements he took a violent attack of malarial fever, and was quickly reduced to such terrible weakness that his companions agreed that his only chance of saving his life lay in returning to England immediately. And so when almost within sight of his goal he had to turn back, and allow himself to be carried in a hammock all the dreary way back to Zanzibar. Catching a mail steamer, he got safely home to England, and was received again into his beloved circle at Hurstpierpoint "almost," as his biographer Mr. Dawson puts it, "as one alive from the dead.”
At first it seemed certain that he would never see Africa again; but gradually his strength returned, and with it a keen desire to resume the task he had undertaken. Meantime the directors of the Church Missionary Society, who had long been anxious to secure a Bishop to take the oversight of all the churches they had planted in East Central Africa, singled him out as pre-eminently qualified for the position, and the Archbishop of Canterbury cordially agreed to consecrate him. In the summer of 1884, accordingly, he became Bishop of East Equatorial Africa, a diocese which embraced not Uganda only, but the immense region which lies between the Victoria Nyanza and the coast. Uganda, however, was still his chief concern, and his failure to reach it on the first attempt made him all the more determined to visit it now without delay, and to endeavor to bring some comfort to its persecuted Christians and some help to the brave Mackay, who still held the fort for Christ and the Church in that unhappy land in which the debased and cruel Mwanga was now king.
Having set things in order at the stations near the coast, and paid a flying visit to Mount Kilimanjaro for the purpose of planting the banner of the cross upon its very slopes, the Bishop therefore began at once to make preparations for his second and last journey towards Uganda. And now he came to what proved to be a fateful decision. Hitherto the missionaries had started from Zanzibar and made for the south end of the lake, thereafter crossing the Victoria Nyanza in boats. But Hannington knew by painful experience the difficulties of that route—its undue length, its exasperating delays, the deadly influences of its fever-haunted swamps. He conceived the idea of a new line of march which, starting not from Zanzibar but from Mombasa, about 150 miles nearer the Equator, should aim not at the south of the lake but at the north. For one thing, this route would be considerably shorter. Moreover, as his brief visit to Kilimanjaro had shown, instead of passing through a low-lying country, it would lead to a large extent over healthy uplands where travelling would be safe for Europeans. The one great difficulty he thought of, a difficulty which until lately had seemed insurmountable, was the fact that he would be obliged to traverse the country of the Masai, whose very name was a word of terror for hundreds of miles around. But not long before, that intrepid young Scotchman, Mr. Joseph Thomson, had explored the Masai country without coming to any harm; and a close study of his fascinating book, Through Masai Land, had set the Bishop thinking. If an explorer could make his way among the Masai, why not a Christian missionary? Anyhow, he meant to try, for he was convinced that if this route was at all practicable, the choice of it in the future would mean to the Society an immense saving of time and money, as well as of precious lives.
Unfortunately there was one element in the case which escaped all Hannington's calculations, and brought about the tragedy of which we have to tell. He did not know that the kings of Uganda regarded the country of Usoga, to the north of the lake, through which he would have to pass, as their "back door," by which no white man must be allowed to enter. Nor was he aware that that very journey of Joseph Thomson’s, from which he was drawing encouragement, had caused a great flutter at the court of Mtesa, and that it was well for that bold traveler that he had turned back after merely touching the lake at its north-eastern extremity, without attempting to advance farther. No blame, however, can be ascribed to the Bishop for his ignorance, nor can he be accused of acting rashly. His plans were made with the approval of both the Sultan of Zanzibar and Sir John Kirk, the British Consul, with the latter of whom he had frequent consultations before starting on his ill-fated journey.
In the meantime something like his old strength and vigor had returned, as may be judged from the fact that, on a preliminary tramp up country in connection with some of his Episcopal duties, he marched back to the coast, a distance of 120 miles, in exactly three days and half an hour—forty miles a day on an average—a feat which is perhaps unexampled in the annals of African travel.
It was in July, 1885, that he finally set off from Mombasa at the head of a caravan 200 strong. He knew that he must be prepared to face many dangers. "Starvation," he wrote, "desertion, treachery, and a few other nightmares and furies hover over our heads in ghastly forms." But nothing disturbed the flow of his spirits. His biographer gives us this glimpse of the Bishop on the march: “All the way during that march to Taita his letters reveal him to us, till we seem to see him as he strides ahead with that springy step of his. Arms swinging, eyes ever on the alert to notice anything new or remarkable, now a snatch of song, again a shout of encouragement, a leap upon some rare flower or insect—the very life and soul of his company, while ever and anon his emphatic voice would be raised in the notes of some old familiar tune, and the wilderness would ring to the sound of a Christian hymn—
“Peace, perfect peace, the future all unknown;
Jesus we know, and He is on the throne.”
By and by his correspondence ceases, as he vanishes into a region which knows not the post office even in its most primitive forms. Fortunately, however, his little pocket-diary was recovered from one of the band that murdered him, and much additional light has been shed upon that last journey by Mr. Jones, a newly ordained native clergyman whom he had taken with him as his companion.
The new route proved to be less easy than Hannington had hoped, and the caravan, besides having to fight its way through obstinate jungles, had a good deal of trouble with unfriendly natives, even before reaching the land of the much-dreaded Masai—the scourges at that time of East Central Africa. The Masai are not black, or members of the great Bantu family by which the greater part of the African continent is inhabited, but belong to what ethnologists call the Hamitic race, occupying a distinctly higher position in the scale of humanity. Up to the age of thirty, Mr. Joseph Thomson tells us, every young Masai is a warrior, and these warriors, or El Moran as they are called, live in huge kraals or military barracks large enough to accommodate 2000 of them at a time, from which they issue periodically on murdering and marauding expeditions. The arrogance and insolence of the warrior class is unbounded, while any attempt at resenting it is met at once by the uplifting of a forest of their great broad-bladed spears.
With these Masai Bishop Hannington had a trying time. It was quite impossible to keep the young warriors out of his tent, and they came crowding in at their pleasure demanding hongo, which is the name for an enforced present, and making themselves free with everything. His chair, his bed, his wash-tub, his biscuit-boxes were all covered with dirty, sprawling figures, and he himself was subjected to impertinences of every kind. They stroked his hair, pulled his beard, felt his cheeks, and tried on his clothes; and not only fingered all his personal belongings, but spat upon them, that being the Masai token of appreciation. Again and again destruction seemed to be hanging over the camp by a single thread, for the El Moran like nothing better than an excuse for slaughter, and if anyone had lost his temper for a moment, it might have been the signal for a wholesale massacre. But at this time the Bishop and his men were mercifully preserved. He notes in his diary, "I strove in prayer; and each time trouble seemed to be averted." And it would appear that even those fierce people felt the power of Hannington's brotherliness. They were by no means agreeable company, with their spitting habits, and the grease and red earth with which they daubed their bodies and so smeared everything they touched. But once when three of them had come with an ox for sale, Hannington invited them to stay with him all night, as it was getting late and their kraal was far off; and, rather to his surprise, they consented quite gratefully. So the Bishop and the three warriors lay down side by side on the floor of the little tent, and though the Masai slept with their spears beside them, he neither showed nor felt the slightest fear. He writes, "They packed themselves away like sardines in a box, and I covered them over first with a leopard's skin, then with a grass mat, and finally a waterproof sheet. They fell almost instantly into a most gentle sleep. I followed their example and, with one exception, I did not wake up until time to start. Wherever we meet we are to be brothers.”
Soon after passing through the Masai country the travelers came to Kavirondo, a region which no white man but Mr. Joseph Thomson had ever visited, while even he had not attempted to go farther. Between them and Uganda nothing now lay but the forbidden land of Usoga. At this stage, owing to the uncertainty of the route, Hannington decided to leave Mr. Jones with the bulk of the caravan encamped in Kavirondo, and to push on himself towards Uganda with fifty of his men.
News travels swiftly even in Africa, and the cruel Mwanga was by this time perfectly aware of the white man's advance, and, as we learn from Mackay, was greatly concerned about it. Mackay did all he could to reassure the king and his advisers, but without effect. Mwanga decided that this daring stranger must die, and sent orders to Lubwa, an Usoga chief, who was his puppet in the matter, to have him and his followers arrested. For fully a week they were kept in close confinement, until a band of Mwanga's soldiers arrived with secret orders to put them all to death.
The Bishop was led through the forest to a place some miles distant from the scene of his imprisonment, and there he found his men before him, stripped naked and bound with thongs. His own clothing was then roughly torn off; and he saw that the end was near. Although weak with fever and greatly reduced by his trying imprisonment, his courage never failed him in that awful hour. He gave his murderers that message to their king to which we referred at the beginning of this chapter; and then kneeling down, he committed his soul to God. A moment after the fierce soldiers rushed upon their victims with their stabbing spears. Two of them, who had been told of for the purpose and were stationed one on either side of Hannington, plunged their weapons into his heart, while all around him the ground was covered with his dead and dying men.
The diary which he kept during his imprisonment is exceedingly touching, especially the entries of the last two days. It was on a Thursday that he died, and on Wednesday we find him writing: "A terrible night, first with noisy drunken guard, and secondly with vermin, which have found out my tent and swarm. I don't think I got one sound hour's sleep, and woke with fever fast developing. O Lord, do have mercy upon me and release me. I am quite broken down and brought low. Comforted by reading Psa. 27" The last entry of all is very brief. It must have been written just before the soldiers came to lead him out to die.
“Oct. 29th, Thursday (Eighth day's prison).—I can hear no news, but was held up by Psa. 30, which came with great power. A hyena howled near me last night, smelling a sick man, but I hope it is not to have me yet.”
Our knowledge of the final scenes comes partly from the testimony of three or four of Hannington's men, whose lives were spared on condition that they would show the murderers how to open his boxes, partly from the evidence of some of the soldiers themselves, who subsequently became members of the Uganda Church, but especially from one of his porters, a young coast Christian, who was with the Bishop to the very last, and was speared by his side and left on the ground for dead. During the night he revived and crawled for miles through the forest, with his bowels protruding from a dreadful wound, till he reached the tent of a native who was a friend of Mackay's, and by whom he was kindly received and tended until his recovery.
So died the lion-hearted Bishop at the comparatively early age of thirty-eight. But "we live in deeds, not years"; and the brave simplicity of his character, together with his martyr death, will keep his name alive as one of the truest of the many missionary heroes of "Darkest Africa.”
AUTHORITIES.—James Hannington and Lion-Hearted, both by Rev. E. C. Dawson, M.A. (London: Seeley and Co.); Through Masai Land, by Joseph Thomson London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington.